Life as a work of art
On the axis: Beauty in life · a whole life
Making one's life a work of art, seeking the intensity of beautiful sensations: is such a life self-sufficient, or does it end up hollow, indifferent to good and evil and stalked by boredom?
This problem is brought out by the thought experiment The picture of Dorian Gray:
Dorian Gray stays forever young and beautiful, free to devote his life to the sheer enjoyment of beautiful sensations and to allow himself anything, while a hidden portrait ages and grows hideous with each misdeed in his place. No excess marks his face or costs him a thing. Imagine you were offered this pact: to make your existence a pure pursuit of beauty and pleasure, freed from any moral price, since another pays it for you.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
Would you accept this pact, and would a life wholly devoted to beauty be the highest one?
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Justification
It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified: the thesis of subordinates the meaning of life to the aesthetic rather than the moral register. Art, not morality, is the truly metaphysical activity of man.
It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.The Birth of Tragedy, §5
The Birth of Tragedy, §5 and §24 · The Birth of Tragedy, "Attempt at a Self-Criticism", §5
Justification
Nietzsche mocks the pleasure-happiness of the utilitarians as much as the morality of duty: the good is neither enjoyment nor disinterested virtue. It is the enhancement of life, the flourishing of power and self-overcoming, the great health of one who dares to create himself and to say yes to existence. A transvalued eudaimonism, where success is measured by strength and greatness, not by comfort.
Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.Twilight of the Idols, Maxims and Arrows, 12
Twilight of the Idols, Maxims and Arrows · The Gay Science, IV-V · Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Anchors: Wilde · Nietzsche · Kierkegaard · Foucault
leads to: The highest good